ALGIERS, January 11 — Ninety-five percent of Algeria’s postal workers are defying the government and continuing their illegal wildcat strike for the twelfth straight day. They’re demanding the firing of both the general director of Algérie Poste and the general secretary of the official trade union, an affiliate of the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA).
The strikers are demanding payment of a 30% wage hike due since January 1, 2008; payment of overtime hours worked in 2011; respect for all the demands won in their June 2011 strike; payment of the 2011 bonus; a wage raise and an investigation of Mohamed Laid Mahloul’s mismanagement, particularly of the promotions granted since he became general director. Eighty percent of the 30,000 postal workers say they’ve not received promotions due them.
The postal strike could seriously affect the functioning of the nation. Over two million retirees receive their retirement checks through the postal service. Some 13 million people of the country’s 34 million bank at the postal offices.
On January 10, post offices remained closed, without even minimum service. Strikers ignored repeated calls by the UGTA, the only union the government recognizes, to return to work. Promises by the minister for the postal service to carry out the January 7 agreement between the government and the UGTA fell on deaf ears.
“We’re fed up with ‘we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that.’ It’s been going on for years, and today, we want something concrete and not press releases,” a striker shouted at a January 10 rally outside the Grande Poste, an Algiers landmark.
A strikers’ committee is supposed to meet with ministry officials on January 12 but the minister won’t be there. “No, he doesn’t have the time,” the workers said. “He prefers to go to the Club des pins [the exclusive, tightly guarded Algiers luxury beachfront].”
People who believed the false information about the strike’s effect broadcast by national and local radio stations were frustrated at finding the Ain Defla city post office closed, but they expressed their solidarity with the strikers and held the government responsible. One person shouted:  “They should give the workers their rights and stop penalizing the users!”
 On January 9, hundreds of postal workers from every corner of Algeria demonstrated in front of the Grande Poste, chanting “We are workers, we are not thieves!” Workers were continuing their sit-in. Strikers were waving signs and engaging in lively discussion with the public.
“By manipulating the media and public opinion, they’re setting the citizens against us,” a 40-year-old postal worker said indignantly. “Management makes us seem irresponsible and lazy!”
The postal ministry and the UGTA keep saying the conflict is “settled, that “major advances have been chalked up” and that demands will be met, but the strikers view these as empty promises since government ministers are implicated in widespread corruption while enjoying total immunity. That’s why postal workers insist that the corrupt general director of Algérie Poste and the corrupt general secretary of the postworkers’ union resign.
The strikers refuse to be bought off with the January 7 agreement that granted the 2011 bonus, promotions due them and a $382 “encouragement” bonus if the workers returned. They have been lied to time after time.
The militancy and defiance of the government by the wildcatting strikers is to be applauded. Their walkout and resulting shutdown of the postal service only proves that without the working class capitalism cannot function. But since the capitalists hold state power, any reforms the strikers do win are subject to be taken away, whether through higher taxes, layoffs or privatization or any of the myriad of ways the bosses can manipulate their system.
As long as the profit system exists, workers will find themselves in a continuous struggle to keep their heads above water. Only the complete destruction of this hellish system and creation of a worker-controlled society — communism — will free the working class from this exploitative treadmill.
Late Bulletin, January 13 — Strikers ended their 13-day strike, winning their retroactive pay hike, providing for promotions based on the work they actually perform, integration of the annual bonus into the union contract and provision for early retirement on substantial pensions.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, December 12 — Students, teachers, and other members of the working class here continue their struggles against violence, injustice, insecurity, unemployment, cholera, occupation, and the outrageous wasting of government funds. They are organizing sit-ins, press conferences and marches to wrest a response from the rulers. The teachers continue to mobilize for better working conditions and a salary that meets their basic needs. Sometimes all these forces meet together — an idea of how it will be when workers everywhere are united under a single flag for revolution.
Since November 13, date of the 10,000-strong demonstration, high-schoolers, teachers, professors, workers and other social organizations have taken to the streets to denounce the system and demand better living conditions. College students have organized many mass activities to keep up the struggle against the bourgeois government, uniting in a general assembly of several campuses to mobilize more forces and build a university-wide base. They are linking up with workers’ and other organizations to plan joint organized actions, like several street demonstrations here.
The government constantly attacks the demonstrators. The police and United Nations occupying force MINUSTAH troops fire on and tear-gas the crowds. There are new victims, killed by bullets.  Plainclothes agents in state vehicles fire on students and demonstrators. Student and other demonstrators respond to these attacks with their usual shout, “We are not afraid!”  Students have been arrested on false pretenses. They are all accused of being window-smashing vandals, and yet they are arrested on the streets where they live or in places where there have been no such incidents. Students, teachers, PL’ers and professors then organize and free these arrested students. The unity of the working class is always a powerful weapon against the injustice of the ruling class and its state.
Among other things, students and others are taking up a struggle against the authorities in Mirebalais [town in the Central Plateau, near the base of the MINUSTAH soldiers who brought cholera to Haiti in October 2010]. The troops hung flags of the European Union in a location which used to bear the name Avenue of the Martyrs because it was the place where the European colonialists sold and killed slaves. Now the authorities want to change its name to Avenue of Europe and fill it with flags of the EU.
The students bought Haitian flags and replaced and burned all the EU flags, defacing the name which these authorities had inscribed on the wall of the entrance. To intimidate them, the government sent police armed with tear gas and heavy weapons. A score of them resisted every attempt at violence by these officers of crime. Eight of them were brutally arrested. Under pressure from other students and PL’ers who supported their struggle, they were released one day later.
This struggle shows how the imperialists seek at all costs to make us forget the past. Yet the real alternative to imperialist flags, past and present, is not the nationalist flags of the capitalist present but the internationalist red flag of the communist future. What workers in Haiti and all around the world need is a society run for the benefit of all, not for the profits of a few.
December 5th was marked by two demonstrations, one by students and the other by laid-off public-sector workers who for years have been leading a fierce struggle to demand justice. These two marches met and joined forces, taking the road to a higher class unity. The struggle continues.

The leaders of the three unions at Downstate won’t lead that fight. They aren´t interested in fighting the bosses. They prefer to be on their side and they pin their hopes on making deals with politicians. One of the unions, CSEA, even agreed to a contract that gave no raise for 2011 or 2012, and only a “bonus” for 2013. It took away nine days pay while imposing higher deductions for health care. Despite that deal, there have been 400 layoff letters, and 600 more are on the way. So much for relying on the politicians.
But we, the workers, have recent examples, such as the Chicago teachers’ strike, where workers, students, parents and the community united to grow the capacity and potential of the workers. At Downstate we have to place ourselves on red alert, and stand up and fight against the layoffs and the passivity of the unions. The fight can give us what the boss wants to take away.  
The U.S. capitalists are trying to squeeze from workers the cost of the bosses’ battle with other imperialists for “top-dog” status in the world. But that doesn’t mean they are broke. They are happy to spend money on themselves. They say there´s no money to maintain the hospital, but they’ve given out contracts for new buildings. The administrators’ salaries used to reach $500,000 a year — but now they’ve gone up to over $700,000! There´s money. We the workers, provide the state with taxes. We pay for everything, including their wars. When politicians make deals to make each other rich, that is our money, too. We are paying the money that could maintain our hospital and our jobs — but it is being used against us. The bosses never have been, and never will be interested in solving our problems. Let’s remember that all the benefits we have are a product of our fight; nothing has been given to us by the bosses.
But to change all this, we must do more. We have held protests with the community, students and patients. Hundreds have signed up for a protest in Albany January 8th.  But we need more: A permanent campaign, with weekly protests in the entrances of the hospital and around it, forums, talks and preparation for a strike to stop the closing.
In the long run, the working class needs much more. Capitalists don´t care about our health. PLP fights for class consciousness, for workers understanding and acting as a class against our enemy, the bosses. We must organize workers to once and for all destroy this system of misery, and to build  a new society, run by workers, which will make healthcare a priority. JOIN US!

LILLE, FRANCE, January 12 — Today some 200 supporters rallied to back the 71-day hunger strike by 41 undocumented workers who represent the demands of 161 of their sisters and brothers for work papers for all. The action of these immigrant workers has exposed the utter disregard of the working class by the racist, “lesser-evil” Socialist government which has refused to issue these papers. More support has come from other undocumented workers who occupied the royal cathedral in Saint Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, on January 9. The strikers initially occupied the Fives-Lille Protestant church but were evicted. Since then, about 40 have lived in a tent in front of Saint Maurice’s church in downtown Lille.
The racist Lille prefecture (the central government’s local representative) has hypocritically blamed the victims, mainly Algerian but also Guinean and Thai workers, for the processing delay, saying only five workers have filed “proper” requests for papers. But eligibility depends on filing eight pay stubs which is impossible since they have been working in the underground economy and therefore lack such proof.
It’s the nature of capitalism which establishes national borders — mostly through wars with rivals — and then uses nationality as a weapon to divide and exploit workers. And President François Hollande’s Socialist government, which enforces this profit system, uses this weapon to help maintain that system. That’s why Progressive Labor Party champions the slogan “Smash All Borders!” and destruction of the system that creates them.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls said, “We aren’t going to legalize 50, 100, 200, or 300 requests for papers because associations have engaged in an action.” This is the same racist who as mayor of Evry in June 2009 complained that there were too many “non-whites” selling things at the local flea market.
The prefecture demands that the group, the “Collectif des sans-papiers du 59,” constitute itself as a legal entity as a precondition for continued negotiations. A member of the Socialist Party first secretary Harlem Désir’s inner circle said, “The party totally supports the government’s immigration policy.”
Meanwhile, the hunger strikers’ condition worsens. Their number has fallen from 126 to 28. Three have been hospitalized. Two Algerian workers were deported after striking for 60 days. The undocumented workers have been drinking sugar water daily, and are now taking vitamins intravenously. One worker explained that he “was experiencing abdominal pain, lost a lot of hair and my teeth were crumbling. I lost 33 pounds in 49 days.” Others have developed similar symptoms, including vomiting and diarrhea. “The health of many was already poor due to their living conditions as undocumented workers,” said supporter Gérard Minet.
Nutritionists find it incredible that they’ve held out for over two months. One said, “You can’t be certain that there won’t be consequences afterwards. Beyond two and a half months, you’re in danger of dying.”
But the fact is capitalists don’t care if these workers die. (UK’s infamous Margaret Thatcher refusal to negotiate with imprisoned IRA hunger strikers led to the starvation deaths of ten of them.) After all, their imperialist wars kill tens of millions. And their disregard for the health and safety of factory workers in the name of profits is all too well known, as the recent murder of garment workers in Bangladesh in fires in buildings with locked exits vividly illustrates.
We fully support the aspirations of these undocumented workers and understand that hunger strikes call attention to the system’s oppression. But given capitalism’s view of workers as commodities to be exploited and then tossed on the scrap heap when they no longer can produce profit, hunger strikes are very limited in their ability to alleviate workers’ suffering.
Workers must support the demands of these undocumented sisters and brothers but must also recognize that only the complete destruction of the system that creates these conditions and divisions can end this oppression. That’s what the goal of communist revolution is all about.

LATE BULLETIN — January 14 — The Lille undocumented workers ended their 73-day hunger strike yesterday following proposals made by the prefecture. Nine were granted papers and seven others’ papers were in the works. One worker, Alouache, who had filed his request a year ago, said, “We will go for a health check-up. This is what we have to do to get papers.”